This paper presents an overview of pastoral systems and addresses rights issues around access and control of resources in the context of climate change.

The Horn of Africa is one of the most conflict-prone areas of the world. It is also home to about 20 million pastoralists, which keep moving with their livestock in search for grazing land and water points. Pastoral conflicts are becoming more and more serious. CEWARN - a regional mechanism for preventing conflicts - tries to close the gap between 'early warning' and 'early response'.

There is growing degradation in sylvo-pastoral lands that were originally under common property regimes, but over which the state now asserts ownership. User associations are being given the right to take charge of regulating how these areas are sustainably exploited by means of use agreements, and are proving an effective instrument in halting the degradation process.

El pastoreo del microzooplancton (< 200 m) sobre el fitoplancton, juega un papel importante en la trofodinámica del sistema pelágico. Para determinar la relevancia de este proceso en Bahía Concepción, se utilizaron la clorofila-a estimada por cromatografía líquida de alta resolución (HPLC) y la microscopía para determinar las tasas de crecimiento del fitoplancton y pastoreo por el microzooplancton obtenidas con la técnica de dilución. El crecimiento del fitoplancton y pastoreo por el microzooplancton fue evaluado en la región media de la bahía.

This paper examines the impact of land reform on agricultural productivity in Tajikistan. Recent legislation allows farmers to obtain access to heritable land shares for private use, but reform has been geographically uneven. The break-up of state farms has occurred in some areas where agriculture has little to offer but, where high value crops are grown, land reform has hardly begun. In cases where collectivized farming persists and land has not been distributed, productivity remains low and individual households benefit little from farming.

Although several institutional and management approaches that address the degradation of the rangelands have been tested in the dry areas of Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA), impact has been limited. Nonetheless, the development of National Action Plans to combat desertification highlights the interest of governments to tackle this issue. Payment for Environmental Services (PES) may be a viable policy option, though, to date, most PES programs have focused on the management of different resources (forests, watersheds).

The study relates village seed systems to biological diversity of millet crops grown by farmers in the semi-arid lands of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, India. In these subsistence-oriented, semi-arid production systems the environment is marginal for crop growth and often there is no substitute for millet crops. Across communities, farmers grow 13 different combinations of pearl millet, sorghum, finger millet, little millet, and foxtail millet varieties, but individual farmers grow an average of only 2–3 millet varieties per season.